OCR A-Level English Language: language change over time (Component 02 Section C) overview quiz quiz

One, AO2 only, since the question is entirely about naming the processes of language change

Four: AO1 (analysis), AO2 (processes and theories), AO3 (contexts) and AO4 (connections)

Two, AO1 and AO5, combining close analysis with a piece of original creative writing

Five objectives, all weighted exactly equally across the whole of the marking scheme

Transitivity, the grammatical analysis of who does what to whom

Synthetic personalisation, a media address feature, not a word-formation process

Borrowing (taking words from other languages)

Turn-taking, a feature of spoken conversation structure and management

A word restricting and narrowing its range of meaning over time

A word gaining markedly more negative connotations, known as pejoration

A word being borrowed wholesale from another language altogether

A word widening its range of meaning over time

Narrowing restricts the range of meaning; pejoration adds negative connotations

They are exactly the same process, two interchangeable labels for one single phenomenon

Narrowing makes a word more positive in tone, while pejoration leaves it entirely neutral

Both terms simply mean that a word falls out of use and disappears from the language

Change is natural and should simply be described as it occurs, never judged or resisted

There is a correct form of language, and change is decline to be resisted

Language change does not happen at all, since a language is wholly fixed and static

Only the spelling of words ever changes, while grammar and meaning stay constant

A descriptivist theory of the precise mechanism by which sound change spreads through a speech community

A specific type of lexical borrowing in which whole phrases are taken from another language

The prescriptivist idea that English was once perfect and is now decaying, which she rebuts

A prescriptive spelling rule governing the doubling of consonants before a suffix

As Aitchison's own sincere beliefs about the steady decline and decay of the language

As a detailed theory of how brand new words are coined and enter everyday usage

They should be avoided altogether, since they have no real place in an exam answer

Critically: to name a prescriptivist attitude, then deploy her rebuttal to assess it

It drove the standardisation of spelling, punctuation and grammar

It brought all further change to a complete and permanent halt across the language

It affected only the vocabulary of English, leaving spelling and grammar untouched

It made written English markedly harder for ordinary readers to read and understand

Spelling errors do not matter at all when you are analysing any kind of older text

It is a pre-standard state of a changing language, before standardisation fixed forms

Older writers were simply unable to spell correctly because they were poorly educated

Spelling is entirely unimportant and never worth analysing in a language change answer

Technology causes no language change at all and can be discounted entirely as a driver

Technology is far too recent a development to have had any influence on the language yet

Change usually has multiple, interacting causes over different timescales

Only social change ever matters, so every other possible driver can be safely ignored

It is always far too short to fill the time available for a thirty-six mark question

It inevitably forces the candidate to use far too much specialist linguistic terminology

It is explicitly forbidden by the rubric of the question and is automatically capped at the very lowest band

It analyses the texts in turn rather than comparing them, starving AO4 (connections across time)

Integrating the four objectives in each comparative point and reaching a weighed judgement

Writing as much as you possibly can, since the longest answers always score the most marks

Reciting every single process of language change you have memorised, one after another

Correcting the spelling and grammar of the older text against modern standard conventions